LinkStreet, Birmingham’s hottest new retail destination, has decided to enhance its offering by bringing pop-up shops into the mix. Taking inspiration from some of London’s best shopping destinations – Seven Dials, Carnaby Street and BOXPARK – it has dedicated a selection of spaces to short-term rents. Ensuring the retail experience is always fresh and evolving.
Every day thousands of shoppers, sightseers and commuters pass through LinkStreet; it’s the main connection between Grand Central station and the Bullring shopping centre. A valuable audience for many retailers. Partnering with Hammerson, Appear Here now has five spaces within the centre, so everyone from young designers to independent fashion and lifestyle brands have the opportunity to launch their ideas here.
For the launch, we introduced a curated line-up of streetwear brands that embodied the new LinkStreet including Trapstar, D|A Clothing, Major London 05 and Vincent Van Doodle. For these brands, this opportunity had been previously impossible.
Daniel, the founder of D|A clothing explains, “we always wanted our own store, but somewhere like Bullring was always completely unachievable in terms of budget. So when we heard about the opportunity to take a two week pop-up in LinkStreet we went for it. In our first week we completely exceeded our expectations for sales. And for first time we had more hits coming to our site from Birmingham than London. It was great way to grow our audience. We now want to trial pop-ups in other destinations across the country.“
For the founders of Vincent Van Doodle, Jules Bedwood and Oli Silvester, their initial two-week pop-up in LinkStreet led to them extending the store for another three months. They needed a high footfall location to expand their business and as Jules points out there’s no better place than Bullring to start, “you’ve got everyone passing through here. We’ve managed to get great feedback from a huge variety of people – who we’d never have got in front of before. It’s helped us define our brand, refine our products and come up with new ideas from customers’ suggestions.”
Learn more about Trapstar's success at LinkStreet here.
And, to check out the LinkStreet spaces, click here.